Introducing the 2026 Alliance Interns
IICD is excited to introduce a cohort of six new interns in the 2026 Alliance Program, continuing its collaboration with École Polytechnique. This program brings master’s students to Columbia University for an immersive research experience, where they contribute to innovative work in cancer dynamics. Over the course of the spring and summer months, the students will partner with IICD faculty and research teams across disciplines, including biomedical engineering, applied mathematics, and computer science.
Meet this year’s Alliance Interns:
Louis Darrigol is an undergraduate student in the Ingénieur Polytechnicien program at École Polytechnique, France’s leading science and engineering school. He specializes in computational biology and computer science. His academic training spans advanced physics, mathematics, chemistry, and machine learning, providing a strong quantitative foundation for addressing biomedical questions.
At the Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics, Louis is developing statistical inference algorithms to analyze cancer variant allele frequency data under the supervision of Dr. Khanh N. Dinh and Prof. Simon Tavaré. His project aims to infer clonal structure and evolutionary dynamics from mutational site frequency spectra, leveraging stochastic and population genetic models to better understand tumor heterogeneity and the role of genetic drift in cancer evolution.
Sylvain Dehayem is a third-year student specializing in Artificial Intelligence at École Polytechnique. Before joining Columbia, Sylvain worked as a research intern at DXO Labs on diffusion models for image inpainting. During this internship, he explored diffusion-based generative models for high-quality image reconstruction. This experience deepened his interest in probabilistic modeling and generative AI.
At Columbia, Sylvain will apply these concepts to guided diffusion models for protein design, working under the mentorship of Dr. Aaron Zweig, Dr. Mingxuan Zhang, and Prof. Elham Azizi. Sylvain is excited to learn from an interdisciplinary research environment and to contribute to methods that connect generative modeling with biological sequence design.
After two years of intensive studies in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, Jeanne entered École Polytechnique to focus on computer science, applied mathematics, and biology. Her goal is to develop quantitative methods that can meaningfully improve healthcare. Jeanne has pursued projects at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine, including modeling biophysical random walks, clustering patient trajectories to better understand disease progression, and estimating treatment effects in precision medicine. Across these experiences, Jeanne has focused on building interpretable methods capable of translating complex biomedical data into actionable insights.
Under Prof. Simon Tavaré’s mentorship, Jeanne will develop a reliable and interpretable method to infer copy number profiles from single-cell DNA sequencing data.
Merwan, a third-year student in Applied Mathematics at École Polytechnique, is deeply passionate about applying mathematical principles to tackle real-world challenges. Merwan became especially interested in biology after discovering the vast opportunities at the intersection of quantitative methods and the life sciences.
At Columbia, Merwan will be working under the supervision of Prof. Bianca Dumitrascu, focusing his research on the generation of counterfactuals for spatial transcriptomics. Ultimately, Merwan aspires to work in artificial intelligence applied to biology and healthcare, with the goal of accelerating scientific research and discovery.
Ness Tchenio is a French student currently enrolled in a Biomedical Engineering master's program at École Polytechnique. Passionate about healthcare, Ness is specializing in computer science, statistics, and artificial intelligence.
Ness is honored to join the IICD, under the mentorship of Drs. Khanh N. Dinh and Simon Tavaré, where she will be working on modeling and inferring missegregation rates and chromosome-specific selection coefficients from single-cell DNA sequencing data.
Beline Yuan is a student in Bioinformatics at École Polytechnique. Beline has previously performed DNA Sequencing and RNA Folding algorithms processing and her current research focuses on applying Graph Neural Networks to analyze direct RNA sequencing datasets.
At IICD, Beline will work with Dr. Sanja Vickovic, focusing on foundations of graph-based analysis and integration of direct RNA sequencing data.
IICD members look forward to the experiences and insights our Alliance Interns will bring to their laboratories in the coming months. In turn, IICD is pleased to nurture the budding careers of these promising, upcoming scientists.